The Way to Love ~ Week One (Excerpts from the 'Way to Love' book) by Anthony De Mello

"After he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray.”

Has it ever occurred to you that you can only love when you are alone? What does it mean to love? It means to see a person, a thing, a situation, as it really is and not as you imagine it to be, and to give it the response it deserves. You cannot love what you do not even see.

And what prevents you from seeing? Your concepts, your categories, your prejudices and projections, your needs and attachments, the labels you have drawn from your conditioning and from your past experiences.

To drop your conditioning in order to see is arduous enough. But seeing calls for something more painful still. The dropping of the control that society exercises over you....You were given a taste for the drug called Approval, Appreciation, Attention, the drug called Success, Prestige, Power....You must tear away from your being the roots of society that have penetrated to the marrow. You must drop out. Externally everything will go on as before, you will continue to be in the world, but no longer of it. And in your heart you will now be free at last and utterly alone....To come to the land of love, you have to pass through the pains of death, for to love persons is to have died to the need for persons and to be utterly alone. How would you ever get there?

1 By ceaseless awareness and the infinite patience and compassion that you would have for a drug addict. SCRIPTURE, WORSHIP, CHARITY TELL GOD OF A PERSECUTION--SELF KNOWLEDGE (TF, P 39)

2 Undertake activities that you can do with your whole being. While you are engaged in them success or approval simply do not mean a thing to you.

3 Return to Nature: Send the crowds away and go up into the mountain....THE LIBERATION (WELL SPRINGS)
Then you will know that your heart has brought you into the vast desert of solitude....If you manage to stay there for a while the desert will suddenly blossom into Love